What a pity it took so long for the financial services industry to coin the term 'precipice bond' to describe the high-income products unravelling so painfully for thousands of investors.

The term perfectly encapsulates the nature of the products; if share prices fail to perform the value of your capital falls off a cliff. But in the thick of marketing the products a few years ago, the emphasis was on the high - but, with insight illusory - levels of income. As Jill Insley outlines in our lead feature, capital losses on many of the bonds are substantial and, in an all too familiar scene, many investors feel they were not warned.

The bonds were marketed by several independent firms of advisers and in at least one case the losses are a double blow, because the firm that marketed them has gone out of business. Complaints are beginning to flow onto the desks of the official bodies whose job it is to clean up such messes. Investors will only win compensation, however, if they prove they were not warned about the risks involved in the bonds. The small print in their documentation will blow the claims of many out of the water. And it will matter not a jot that the bond was marketed to them by an independent financial adviser because IFAs can, quite legally, sell direct to investors through mailshots without interviewing their customers. This is a rotten system and the Financial Services Authority must review it. It is the job of independent advisers to give advice, not to sell.

The European Commission has touched a nerve in suggesting that women should not be charged more than men for certain types of insurance. There is all sorts of discrimination in insurance; between smokers and non-smokers, the healthy and infirm, manual workers and white collar. And the trend is increasing as technology advances.

The EC will have to go back to the drawing board about its ideas on men versus women, but it has opened an important debate.